Wednesday, March 24, 2010

After a while, it gets boring naming your French and Belgian beers after types of mice, so I thought I'd name this one after one of my favorite mice in literature. This is a Belgian blond that is going to be brewed for the Brewer's Heritage Festival on June 11th and 12th in Forrest Park. Last year's ale went very quickly and so I hope this one will be just as popular.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

It was fun. Small scale brewing might just be my new thing. It'll certainly due in a pinch.

Here's a pictorial account of my process.

1. Heat up water to ~155

2. Crush the specialty grain with a meat tenderizer. (This leads to a pretty inconsistent crush, but I just need color and flavor.)

3. Add the crushed grain directly to the warmed water without using a grain bag. This is the similar to the difference between tea bags and loose leaf tea. The picture below shows the steeped grain liquid after full absorption of water in the grain.

4. After 20 minutes or so, I strained the weak wort into a larger kettle.

5. Once the wort was brought to boiling, I killed the heat and added my DME. I brought it back to boiling and added the first hops.

6. After a last minute addition of more hops, it was time to chill. Since this is such a small batch, it only takes the ice in the freezer to get it down.

7. Time to go into the jug fermenter. I used my handy strainer and funnel to get my chilled wort to its 2-week resting place.

The next time I do this, I'm going to account for more boil off. I didn't have this at a crazy boil, but between the grain and hops soaking up their share, I'm a little short.